


Baby, Have Mercy On Yourself

by mamalovesherbagels



Series: Chimney Whump Central [7]
Category: 9-1-1 (TV)
Genre: Because of course he does, buck impulsively does heroic stuff, chimney missing his mom is my shit, he misses his mom a lot, heavy hints of chimney having undiagnosed ocd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:55:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24577912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mamalovesherbagels/pseuds/mamalovesherbagels
Summary: He likes to play things by the book. It's the only way he knows how, really. It doesn't make him special or smart, just competent at his job. Buck, however, likes to jump right into things head first.
Relationships: Maddie Buckley/Howie "Chimney" Han
Series: Chimney Whump Central [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1726990
Comments: 2
Kudos: 21





	Baby, Have Mercy On Yourself

Chimney takes yellow tulips, his mother’s favorite, and apologies to her grave every Mother’s Day. Birthdays hurt too much, to think about the years she deserved and never got, but he brings her flowers on Mother’s Day. And apologies. Always apologies.

It’s not like he plans it-- he buys the tulips and then broods over all the possible things he did wrong in the past year on drive over, no- but it happens. Each and every time.

He sits there, tells her how much he loves and misses her, and somehow, an acknowledgement of his shortcomings pours out of him without a second thought, as if self criticism is the most natural extension of his love.

This year he’s sorry for not pulling more people out of the water during the tsunami, for not realizing something nefarious was going on at the call center sooner, and for hating Hen for wanting to leave him.

“Mom,” he whispers, eyes wet with tears that feel the same as they did when he was fifteen, “I’m sorry. I’ll do better. I miss you.”

.

Buck dives into things without thinking. Half the time it makes Chimney think he’s stupid (he’s not, but you get the point) and the other half of the time it makes Chimney burn with jealousy.

He _wishes_ he could major, hugely consequential decisions in a split second. Sometimes even just trying to decide where to take Maddie for dinner that night makes him sweat with anxiety.

In the field, when he’s saving lives, there’s a book of rules. He knows what to do. Check vitals, make sure the airway is clear, each step leads to the next one. Fire protocol is much the same. Try this, if it doesn’t work, _then_ you can try this. It’s in your blood, Bobby had once told him. Nah, it’s in his programming. They practically beat it into you in firefighter training, and throw the textbooks at your head in paramedic school. He’s not special, he just knows how to follow the rules.

He’s great at rules, actually. But it still doesn’t make him special; it makes him feel crazy.

He doesn’t wash his hands until they go red because of a fear of getting sick, he washes his hands until they go red because he’s afraid of getting someone _else_ sick. He’s a paramedic, he touches people, sometimes with gloves, sometimes without.

He cannot risk accidentally contaminating someone with germs meant for him.

It started back when his mom underwent chemotherapy, he thinks. Lowered immune system, a doctor had said, increased risk of infection. Oh, he had to be so careful. So many nights in libraries spent reading the human body, how it functions, what harms it. Do you know vitamin C helps the immune system? He can still recite it, it’s because phagocytes and t-cells need vitamin C to--

Buck runs into a building that’s about to collapse that Bobby had just ordered them out of.

Chimney follows him, because it wouldn’t be protocol to send just one firefighter into any dangerous situation.

.

Buck pushes him out of the way, which is something he never could have done, because there’s no clear instruction for that and he wouldn’t have time to think it through.

Hen tells him he would’ve done the same thing, a million times over, because he’s brave and heroic and loves Buck more than almost anything in the world.

He doesn’t believe her. Why do they all think he’s so brave when he just what he’s supposed to do?

One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.

He counts the compressions in fours.

“You can’t die. You can’t die. You can’t die. You can’t die.”

He does the math in his head later based on how much time would’ve passed if he had been performing CPR at the exact right rhythm one is supposed to. 

Evan Darren Buckley is dead for one minute and forty-two seconds before he comes back.

.

Maddie is a wreck at the hospital. Everyone is. Just because he got him back doesn’t mean he’s going to ultimately pull through.

She cries a guttural, pleading, breath stealing type of cry he’s heard all too many times in his tenure with the LAFD. It never gets any easier to hear, and only gets harder when it’s coming from the person he loves the most.

She clings to him, and he doesn’t get it. He should’ve known his team, he should’ve known Buck well enough to anticipate him running into literal fire, to have stopped him before he even took off running.

He did the next best thing, but next best isn’t good enough when his de facto little brother, his girlfriend’s actual little brother’s heart stopped beating for one minute and forty-two seconds. (If he was good enough at his job, that is.)

Buck’s going to live.

The doctor gives them the best possible news.

It still isn’t good enough for him. Buck shouldn’t have had to square off against death in the first place.

Maddie runs off to Buck’s room.

He runs out of the hospital.

.

It’s not Mother’s Day and Buck just almost died, so there are no yellow tulips. But there are still apologies.

“Mom, I didn’t…” he trails off, hugging her tombstone, hoping he can feel some love, some forgiveness radiating off it. She’s his mom. It’s her job to forgive the unforgivable in him, right?

“I should’ve saved him, before he needing saving. I-I should’ve… Mom, I’m sorry. Why do I always do this? If I had just… I try my best and yet I just can’t stop the bad things from happening.”

She doesn’t say anything back, she never does, but if God and heaven were real, he would hear her screaming down from the sky that her expectations for him aren’t even half of the standards he holds himself to.

But he can’t hear her, and she can’t say anything, so he takes her silence as he wants it to be. Forgiveness, but the reluctant kind. A quiet kind of disappointment, as opposed to the anger he had grown used to from his dad.

“Mom, I’m so… I’m sorry. I’ll do better. Next time I’ll save him.”

“First of all, I sure as hell hope there is no next time,” a quiet, fragile sounding voice says from behind him, “second of all, you did save him, so I don’t know what you’re apologizing to your mother for.”

“Maddie,” he breathes after a long moment, not turning back to look at her, “what are you… shouldn’t you be with your brother?”

“Those flowers,” she whispers, “are those from a few weeks ago? Is that where you went on Mother’s Day?”

He nods, still not facing her.

“I love you, Howie. I don’t know why you blame yourself for things that aren’t your fault. You saved him.”

“I shouldn’t have let him go in there.”

“He’s a Buckley,” she says, the sound of tears thick in her throat betraying the easiness with which she says it, “when there’s something we really want to do, you know you can’t stop us from doing it.”

“You saved him,” she repeats after a few silent seconds, “you saved him and I never can repay you for that. I already loved you before, there are no words for how much I love you now. So I think the least you could do is explain to me why you ran from the hospital my brother is staying at and I had to look up your mother’s grave location to find you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, I need you to actually tell me,” she sighs, taking a few steps forward to kneel down in front of me, “and I need you to tell me without any unnecessary apologies.”

“It’s not unnecessary! Your brother almost died, did die for a few minutes, and I just let him… I let him go in that building…”

“Chimney,” she sniffles, wiping at her eyes, “you can’t honestly think this is your fault.”

“M-Maddie,” he whimpers, hating himself for how weak it comes out, “I think something inside me is broken.”

.

Maddie doesn’t judge, she just loves. It’s like how he remembers his mom, and not the impossibly perfectionistic ghost he turns her into at her headstone.

“You’re not broken,” she tells him, “no one is ever _broken_ , they just haven’t realized how strong they are yet.”

He doesn’t feel strong. At all. Or smart, or special, or brave, or any of the other litany of nice sounding words Maddie uses to describe him. It still feels kind of nice to hear, though, especially coming from someone as strong, smart, special, and brave as she is.

Buck thinks that Chimney is all of those things, too, as do Hen, Bobby, and Eddie.

And Christopher, who draws a messy drawing of him looking about ten times more muscular than he actually is on the front of a card that simply reads “Thank you for saving my Buck” on the inside.

It feels good, but hard.

The last time so many people told him he was brave it was after his mom’s funeral.

.

Maddie’s stomach is still flat, and no one besides the two of them know that she’s pregnant. Well, Hen knows, he’s pretty sure, but she’s respectful enough of their friendship to not let him know that she’s figured it out, and to act surprised when he does eventually outright tell her. 

So the two of them plus Hen know, but Hen only half knows because she’s pretending that she doesn’t.

The bubble of privacy, the joy just for the two of them is fun, and exciting, and nice and he’s grateful for it, but he knows the joy is only going to expand once Maddie is out of her first trimester and they get to share that joy with the people they love the most.

It doesn’t mean he’s without his doubts and reservations, though.

Buck is back at work and Chimney still can’t feel happy about it. He’s of course happy Buck is alive, for sure, but he can’t feel happy about all the nice comments and gratitude filled half-jokes about him _saving_ him.  
If he had done a good enough job, the job the LAFD had trained and hired him to do, Buck never would’ve needed saving in the first place.

And that’s the thing, he thinks, as he’s sitting on the couch eyeing everyone laughing and talking at Buck’s welcome back party. If he can’t even… if he can’t even get out of his head for the celebration of the baby's uncle’s life, the life that he brought back using CPR… what the hell kind of emotional damage is he going to do to that baby?

He should be hugging and smiling and laughing and eating and dancing with everyone else, and yet, all he can do is sit and stare and think.

He loves Maddie, and she’s definitely the smarter one of the two of them, but he really think she’s wrong about people not being able to be broken.

“Chim, get up, dance with me,” Hen orders, Maddie not far behind her.

“Up, up, up,” Maddie reiterates, clapping her hands in a way that makes her seem far more cute than a thirty-six year old should be able to be.

“I-I was just…”

“Up, now,” Hen rolls her eyes, grabbing one of his hands as Maddie grabs the other, yanking him up to standing position.

“Oh my god, guys.”

“Shut up, hero, this is your party, too. You’re gonna have fun even if we have to force you into it.”

“Hen’s right,” Maddie nods emphatically, “no time for sulking at my brother’s welcome back party when you’re the one who brought him back. You both are heroes and you both are alive and we’re going to celebrate it.”

Well, he always had trouble telling her no.

When he and Hen dance (badly) to Billy Joel, when Maddie paints frosting on his nose with her finger, and when Buck half-jokingly air grinds on him, he has a thought.

Maybe this baby isn’t completely screwed.

Maybe he _can_ have fun at the party, he just needs some help from his friends to get him there.


End file.
